Rimbaud et la Commune. Microlectures et perspectives (review)

There is much to impress in Rimbaud et la Commune, a behemoth of a study by one of the world's leading authorities on Arthur Rimbaud, if not of 19th-century French poetry tout court. In some respects, it's no exaggeration to say that this study forms a kind of grand companion to the author's earlier, path-breaking works on Rimbaud's literary politics (e.g., Rimbaud et la ménagerie impériale [1991], Stratégies de Rimbaud [2004]) which had already accomplished so much in the realm of convincing and attuning readers and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic to the politically and esthetically subversive (and specifically Communard) dimensions of Rimbaud's poetic and epistolary œuvre.

The depth and breadth of Murphy's knowledge of 19th-century literature and culture is in full force in these pages, along with an unimpeachable philological rigor (and sense of humor) as the author methodically constructs an argumentative architecture around the central premise that Rimbaud's work from 1871-1872 situates itself within, and situates, its historico-political conjuncture. Indeed, Rimbaud et la Commune is striking—inter alia—for its patient philological work and prudence with respect to the kind of theoretical interventions that made, for example, Kristen Ross's similarly titled study of Rimbaud a work of reference (on that note, while Ross's Hardt-Negrian via Spinoza claims concerning the "politics of the swarm" in Chant de guerre parisien are deeply problematized by Murphy's riffs on the valence of "hannetons" in the seventh, epic chapter of Rimbaud et la Commune). In these pages, one will find a colorful and fascinating cast of characters, but no Lefebvres, Rancières or Badious, even if at the heart of this work one detects powerful arguments about the points of convergence and divergence of literature and democracy; a full-throated call for, and demonstration of the rich potential of, a sociocritical hermeneutics of poetry; and a kind of theory of the Commune as an "Event," that is, as a radical, utopian disruption of the apparent "naturalness" of the everyday that seems to make possible the "coming-to" (ex-venire) of new forms of social relations and desires—an "Event" in Rimbaud's poetry and in history to which, as Murphy convincingly demonstrates, the poet largely remains faithful up until the end (and on the topic of why Rimbaud "escapes into silence," we'll refer the reader to the rather brilliant chapter entitled "Avec Verlaine, poète socialiste").

To the degree that Murphy is decidedly not the sort of critic to shy away from a theoretical argument (as occasional forays into psychoanalysis and discourse theory attest), one must understand that the stakes of Rimbaud et la Commune consist in beating at their own game and on philological terms, those critics who see the political and the literary (or the historical and the symbolic, the text and the context, etc.) as irreconcilably antithetical. Over the course of 800-plus rollicking pages, Murphy takes us from the discretely subversive summer poems of 1870 through the metrically revolutionary "derniers vers" of 1872, in passing through a truly insightful reading of the oft-commented "seer letters" of May 1871 and the explicitly Communard poems that these letters contain precisely as a kind of poetic praxis illustrating Rimbaud's (in) famous theory of poetic "voyance" (cf., the rather brilliantly inter-weaving chapters 4-6 on these letters, the poems included in them, and the politics, literary and otherwise, of their addressees). In a word, from start to finish, Rimbaud et la Commune irresistibly demonstrates that the et in the title is a junctive, not a disjunctive one; that Rimbaud's relationship to, engagement with, and inscription of the Commune, the semaine sanglante, and, more broadly, of a vast intertextual (and ekphrastic) field of radical oppositional discourse in Second Empire journalism, caricature, and Parnassian poetry is not a matter of interpretation any more than it is a question of ideological instrumentalization by...